She had believed she could not live if her husband were
to be taken away from her; but she found herself often glad that he
was dead,-- glad that he was spared the sight and the knowledge of
the things which happened; and even the yearning tenderness with
which her imagination pictured him among the saints, was often
turned into a fierce wondering whether indignation did not fill his
soul, even in heaven, at the way things were going in the land for
whose sake he had died.
Out of such throes as these had been born the second nature which
made Senora Moreno the silent, reserved, stern, implacable
woman they knew, who knew her first when she was sixty. Of the
gay, tender, sentimental girl, who danced and laughed with the
officers, and prayed and confessed with the Fathers, forty years
before, there was small trace left now, in the low-voiced,
white-haired, aged woman, silent, unsmiling, placid-faced, who
manoeuvred with her son and her head shepherd alike, to bring it
about that a handful of Indians might once more confess their sins
to a Franciscan monk in the Moreno chapel.
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